Dear marketers, spammers, PR people and lazy SEO folk. This is a friendly final warning to stop sending me crappy articles to “share”, rubbish pitches to promote your products (with zero benefit to me) and other blog spam.
I’ve tried to be nice to you – I’ve written several posts outlining my thoughts on your approach (see: “Sponsorship, Links, Reviews – Where Should Bloggers Draw the Line?” and “Marketers: Here’s 5 Ways to Make Bloggers Hate You” for instance), and even suggested tips to help you approach bloggers like me. I made them easy to find, and I also make it very plain and simple for you to find out that I work in the online marketing industry myself. What else can I do?!
Despite all this effort, I’m now getting daily emails that take the following format:
“Hello Henry,
Great article in your recent post! Thanks for sharing it. I have an article that may be of interest to you and your readers.“10 Things to Consider Blah blah blah”
Feel free to pass the article along if you think they’d like it.”
Whilst I don’t wish to be presumptuous in assuming that my readers don’t want to be spammed with cruddy, low-quality, written-for-SEO articles, I don’t think it would benefit any of us if I “shared” this toss – and I’m not even sure (from the sparce emails you chuck out) what you want me to do. Frankly, I find this approach incredibly patronising and lazy.
The “marketing” being attempted here insults bloggers’ intelligence in a number of ways – not least of all by assuming that they are stupid enough to blindly share this crap without any idea of why they’re being sent it (namely: lazy SEO). Don’t even start me on the fact that they aren’t offering ANY sort of reward in exchange – and haven’t made even the most cursory effort to read my blog first.
I’ve often toyed with the idea of “naming and shaming” the people and agencies sending this crap – or perhaps taking their article and rewriting it myself, amusingly pretending that I misunderstood what they wanted from me. But this takes a lot more effort than they deserve, and frankly more time than I have. But then I thought of a better idea…
So it stops here. From this point on, any email I get in this format will be forwarded on to the company being promoted, explaining to them what a lazy marketing agency they have, what the risks of this approach are and how much damage they are doing to their relationship with bloggers. I’ll even send them a link to this post, so they can see how little research you did in finding my blog.
As I’ve said in previous posts, I’m more than happy to promote/review products, write for commercial reasons or even host (genuine) guest posts from other parents. But I’m no longer going to blithely ignore crappy emails like the one above. The buck stops here – you have been warned!
Your frustrations are well-founded – BUT (!) – it’d be wrong of you to blanket-solve the problem as much as you believe it’s wrong for them to blanket-market.
So, look. On one hand, sure – you’re right – marketers shouldn’t just shotgun out e-mails without direction and suggest you share them. But on the other hand, remember, they’re marketers, and from some guy running a start-up out of his bedroom, all the way up to, say, Disney, there are people sending e-mail to a LARGE group of people, hoping that they’ll “share” the story/press release – and that sharing doesn’t necessarily mean always copy-pasting it onto your blog, though I’m sure most would love it. Sometimes, it means you’ve got this info, and if at all relevant, you can tip off your readers with a summarized Facebook status, or use it as part of a larger article. I get tons of these types of e-mails, and though initially I might think “Pshh, hell no I’m not going to share this news”, I might later on think “darn, that press release I got for baby car safety actually fits into an article I’m writing right now.”
Okay, okay. I know you’re not really talking completely about that. You’re talking about the smalltime people that e-mail from a Gmail account claiming to be with some company with “SEO” in the name, and they do the formulaic “love your site, great article, here’s something you should share” pitch. You’re right, it’s tired and rookie. But be careful about including the line “feel free to pass this along” in with your hatred of spam e-mail, because like I said, you see this line from the SEO-scam artists all the way up to Disney.
Cheers, man.
I like your idea, it’s a constructive way of dealing with things. It’ll be interesting to see if you get any response given that the types of e-mails you describe are probably normally automated. It reminds me of something that I do when I receive junk mail through the door – if there’s a freepost envelope, I just post it back with nothing in it. That way, the company has to pay to receive an empty envelope. I like to see this as a way of supporting public services as I believe that the Royal Mail doesn’t make much money from non-commercial post.
Thanks for the input, gents! Zach, don’t worry – I’m certainly not going to lump them all together. As a marketer, I send emails out myself – but I try to treat the blogger as I would wish to be treated. The lazy examples I quoted are almost airways just crappy SEO posts with no worth of value. I always consider genuine approaches.
Thanks Jonathan – I shall keep you posted!
Great article.